I also just finished writing 1-2 pages – maybe 1,000 words – based on a diagnostic tool that it took me over a month to build. I’m hoping to spin what it tells me out into a longer article in future, but for now I thought I’d share it here, with some commentary on how I made it, what it told me, and why it is not an effective argument.

One of my book chapters is on a group of enslaved and free people in Richmond who raised funds for victims of famine in Ireland. The First African Baptist Church of Richmond raised just under $35 in 1847. While the amount per congregant was low (the church listed thousands of active members, but many of them were not able to regularly attend because of their enslavement) the donation itself was relatively unique in the church’s history. This was one of the first times that this congregation raised funds for people not connected with the church. I have a much longer argument on the political work that this donation did, but I wanted to be able to make some concrete statements about congregants’ experiences in the 1840s.

This was helped by the church minute books, which recorded the names of baptized, excluded and restored members (there were a lot of exclusions for adultery in the 1840s) as well as the names of the men and women who owned the congregants who were enslaved. So I built a network (using Gephi, which benefits tremendously from the recent update) that showed only relationships characterized by slavery, to see if any white Richmonders were particularly over-represented. (made with sigma.js and the Gephi plugin created by OII)

While some men and women owned more than one congregant, by and large this network was fairly diffuse. Congregants obviously shared the religious and physical space of the church, but their relationships outside of the church did not seem to be conditioned by their enslavement by particular men and women. (There is an excellent and robust literature on enslaved people in urban spaces, resistance and community building, which I won’t recap here – but suffice it to say that scholars have charted many other ways of relating beyond ownership by the same person, and I assume those modes were at play in 1840s Richmond).

As I put together the database of congregants, I realized that many and unusual names (Chamberlayne, Poindexter, Frayzer, Polland, among others) recurred among both slaveholding and enslaved people. So I made another network, this one assuming that people who shared a surname had some kind of relationship (this is not a 100% defensible assumption – some of the more common names might have been happenstance). With those kinds of connections, the network (which includes all of the same people as above) becomes much more dense, with clusters that signify relationships based both in slavery and (most often coerced) sex.

It’s interactive! It’s dynamic! It’s a network!

It is not an argument.

At best, this is a tool that lets me locate an individual and see connections. It relies on two kinds of relationships (and likely overstates the certainly of genetic relationships or previous ownership based on shared surnames). It helped me to write two pages about the density of connections among black and white Richmonders, and bolster claims about the broader relationships that the First African Baptist Church was embedded in. It remains an investigative tool.

I think it could be helpful, which is why I am putting it on the internet, but it does not constitute argument. It does not even constitute analysis (that happened behind the scenes in R). It did take – from the start of transcription to now – over a month to build.

Was it worth it? Well, I was able to see connections among the 800+ congregants mentioned in the minute books from 1845-1847 that I would not have been able to see just by reading the names. I was able to place individuals in a broader social context. I wrote two pages. I think that work like this can be tremendously generative, but either happens behind the scenes and only lives on a researcher’s computer, or is presented as the end of an investigative process. This is firmly in the middle of the investigation, but I suppose that has value too.

I’m sitting down to tackle my introduction, and wanted to say something specific about the timeline for famine philanthropy. Tableau helped to track the total number of donors by organization. This is a better measure than the total amount of donations – at least until I go back and standardize British pounds and U.S. dollars, but it gives a good sense of time timeline of relief.

Gephi is a very useful tool. I’m very much looking forward to the new release that seems always on the horizon. In the meantime, though, every time I open Gephi it crashes, and then I dive down a long rabbit hole of trying to re-write the program code, and then I get angry and go home. So I’ve been delighted to find that a combination of R (for manipulating and analyzing the data) and d3.js (for visualizing the data) does most of the work of Gephi with much less frustration.

I’ve been using Kieran Healy’s work on Paul Revere and network centrality and applying it to a cohort of men who served on the boards of philanthropic organizations in New York in the 1840s. I am particularly in the officers General Relief Committee for the Relief of Irish Distress of the City of New York. These men – Myndert Van Schiack, John Jay, Jacob Harvey, George Griffin, Theodore Sedgewick, Robert B. Minturn, George Barclay, Alfred Pell, James Reyburn, William Redmond and George McBride Jr. – were deeply politically connected, but don’t seem to have had much of a relationship to one another.

Healy’s script, and Mike Bostock’s d3 blocks helped me to build a matrix which tracked relationships between philanthropists via organizations, making note of the number of organizational connections that different pairs of men shared; and another matrix which tracked relationships between philanthropic organizations and social clubs via philanthropists, making note of the number of men that each organization shared. I used the former to build a force-directed network diagram, which, in combination with some R based analysis, suggests that while the New York Famine Relief Committee officers didn’t often serve on other committees together, they shared other social connections.

For example Jonathan Goodhue was not a member of the famine relief committee, but served on other committees with nearly every General Relief Committee officer. Of the New York famine relief committee members, Jacob Harvey was the most centrally connected member. This data has pointed me in some new archival directions, but also give a much better sense of the ways in which people were connected to one another than comparable textual descriptions might do.

I wanted to work through the NYPL’s mapping tutorial, so I built this. Still working on color coding the markers for different themes, but they can be toggled via the drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner.

Peter Singer has a great article in the Washington Post that begins with the public outpouring for Batkid, and why people are more likely to give to something like the Make-A-Wish foundation than they are to organizations that provide sleeping nets in regions with malaria, or treatment for diseases that are treatable in the United States but often deadly elsewhere, before turning to the United States’ complicity in global poverty:

People who get money as a gift are likely to be more willing to give it away than those who do not receive this unexpected bounty. Nevertheless, the “giving experiment” shows not only that many Americans would like to help the global poor but also that they are genuinely happy to do so. All they need is the knowledge to be able to do so effectively.

I’ll leave others to take on this last point – though I think that structural poverty and inequality are an outcome of reduced foreign spending by the U.S. government, I imagine most Americans would balk at being accused of desiring global poverty (and I think that making the link between the one and the other was one of the central points of this article.)

But, I was more interested in an earlier claim, that

The answer [to why we focus on Batkid rather than helping unknown multitudes] lies, at least in part, in those above-mentioned emotions, which, as psychological research shows, make the plight of a single identifiable individual much more salient to us than that of a large number of people we cannot identify.

and

[T]he unknown and unknowable children who will be infected with malaria without bed nets just don’t grab our emotions like the kid with leukemia we can watch on TV. That is a flaw in our emotional make-up, one that developed over millions of years when we could help only people we could see in front of us. It is not justification for ignoring the needs of distant strangers.

Rhetorically, I absolutely agree with him. It’s easier to make a case about the utility of a donation when you focus on one story rather than generalities – and studies bear this out. I’m not as convinced that we can axiomatically make the jump from particular > general to proximate > far. In the nineteenth century, I’ve found that distant philanthropy was very attractive precisely because donors could imagine the best results of their donations. (It also had a lot – and I think more – to do with the ways in which distant philanthropy was more suited to political framing. It’s much easier to say that the Irish famine is really about the abuse of centralized power, and therefore a good paralell for the Wilmot Proviso, for example, when the donors – in this case, Southern slave owners – were removed from the particularities of the crisis by several thousand miles) But I don’t see this as a fundamental “flaw in our emotional makeup” – a phrase which suggests that people (in Singer’s case, Americans) are unable to imagine, or even appropriate the suffering of distant strangers. A long history of international and institutional philanthropy undermines his somewhat absolute claim. In the case that I study, thousands of people with no connection to Ireland gave over one million dollars. The same can be said of other nineteenth-century causes, and with the advent of the Red Cross in the late nineteenth century, donors weren’t even giving to a particular set of suffering strangers, but to the relief of distant victims broadly.

So if not from the research, and not from the history of philanthropy, from where does Singer’s conflation of distance and particularity come? He uses two examples from NPR callers, one woman who refused to donate money to overseas causes, because she couldn’t be sure her money would help someone, and another whose experiences in Haiti prompted her to give because she had been able to see exactly how far very small (for most Americans) donations would go. This seems less about distance to me than it does about the specific versus the general (this whole topic is also informed by how Americans value the lives of different people, a determination often inflected by race, gender and class), but I was also struck by the fact that I have never come across a famine donor anxious about how their money was being spent. Some of the people who gave to Irish famine relief also gave to help the Irish Revolution of 1848, and many of those donors wrote frequently and at great length about their hopes that money would go to particular people or aims (guns vs. revolutionary literature, for example) – but in the case of famine fundraising, which began in 1845 and continued into 1852, I have not found a single instance of anxiety about fraud. And while some appeals told stories of individual sufferers, most appeals for Irish aid describe misery in very general terms – emphasizing the extent of distress and widespread scarcity rather than the fact that a donation could save one Irish child.

Certainly, philanthropy has changed between the nineteenth century and today, but I’m struck by the fact that the kind of proximate, paternalist charity that Singer says is – and always has been – the philanthropic norm, was absolutely typical of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century charity, but was radically disrupted by market, print and transportation revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century.

I took a trip down to Charleston today to look at the records of the Charleston Hibernian Society – the body that collected donations for famine relief in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. All told, these men took in approximately $15,000, and letters to the English consulate in New Orleans suggest that still more donations were made directly to British representatives in America. Sadly, the 1886 Charleston earthquake seems to have destroyed the minute books between February of 1847 and early 1857, so there was less than I’d hoped for. Nevertheless, I’ve come away with a list of members of the Charleston Hibernian Society to crosslist (and hopefully map) against the list of donors I’ve already assembled.

I also came across this delightful budget from February of 1847 –

The Treasurer Reports having paid the following bills:

Hayden & Gregg for Lamps $ 3.38

To Patriot for Advertising 17.50

G W Black for Building Drain 157.22

Stevens & Betts for Spittons & Spade 4.62

Stephen Jones for Repairing fence in yard 3.37

And for 1 Doz Porter 3.25

Aside from whatever was going on with that drain (G.W. Black was admitted to the Hibernian Society at the same meeting that bill was submitted, and seems to have been related to other members of the society, so I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was getting some kind of kick-back), I very much appreciate that a dozen porters could be bought for the same price as lamps or fence repairs, and that whoever bought those beers saw fit to charge them to the Society. The treasurer’s books also featured several remittances for whiskey.

Although the Google map engine API is meant for businesses, there’s a lite version for non-business map geeks. I like this tool because it’s easy to embed a lot of data into the map. Here’s a quick version of the Charleston famine donors map that I’d previously made just using Google maps and dropping “pins” in places where donors were located:

All of these donations were printed in Charleston newspapers, and when I first started mapping them I was struck that (1) many of the donors printed in Charleston papers didn’t seem to live in Charleston and (2) how many of them were slaveowners.
The new map is here.

It turns out, tracking down the addresses of 19th c. New Yorkers is a pretty time consuming process. Here are the first 20 or so, laid over a 1845 map of New York City. Purple represent work addresses, yellow represent home addresses.

Building on the patterns I’ve been trying to track in famine donors, I also noticed today that of the thirteen individual donors from New York City, nearly a quarter lived within a few blocks on Henry Street. I don’t know what it’s about, or if it’s just a random happenstance but I’ve got a whole other list of NYC donors and I look forward to finding out!

I’m deep in the next-year’s-research planning phase of the summer, which is mostly comprised of figuring out what other donor communities I want to look at for the book manuscript. I chose sites for the dissertation largely based on news production – locales in which a lot of news was being produced, reproduced and consumed – but for the book I’ve been thinking about how to better center the experiences of non-elite donors, which means looking for places from which donations flowed, rather than places in which people were merely reading about the famine in Ireland. As part of this, and as part of a related project to collect the names of donors to a wide range of 19th century philanthropic projects, I’ve been working on a database which tracks not only individual donations, but also biographical information about donors. I’ve been using this data – and in particular donations to national famine relief funds (the American Society of Friends rather than the New York Irish relief committee, for example) to try to map places where donations came from, but that I haven’t yet explored.

So: a very few, very preliminary findings:

Most of these donations are coming from cities.

Many are on behalf of relief committees of entire cities – it’s not clear yet whether these are Quaker relief committees or ones without religious (or with another religious) affiliation, but I hope that’s something I’ll be able to check out at the Haverford Quaker archives.

Of those donations made on behalf of urban relief committees, the people doing the collecting were almost entirely merchants.